AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1911–15 Premiered: 1917, Munich Libretto by the composer Act I The composer Palestrina used to serve the pope. He was dismissed when he married, but has written nothing since his wife died. His pupil Silla finds his music old-fashioned. Palestrina tells Cardinal Borromeo that Silla may be right. Perhaps the style of the old masters is obsolete. Borromeo ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Renaissance

(Jo-van’-e Per-loo-e’-je da Pa-les-tre’-na) 1525/6–94 Italian composer Palestrina is named after a small town near Rome, where he is thought to have been born. He was educated in Rome; in 1537 he was a choirboy at the basilica of S Maria Maggiore, one of the city’s principal churches and an important musical establishment. By 1544 he was back in Palestrina ...

• Classical

full picture can only be appreciated by taking into account music by the many recognized masters who do not feature here: among them Du Fay, Tallis, Byrd, Palestrina, Domenico Scarlatti, Gluck and a whole pantheon of Romantic and twentieth-century figures. Women are also absent from the story because, for reasons too complex to be merely ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Romantic
• Instrumentalist

great music. He was interested in composers from earlier centuries, and as well as J. S. Bach he transcribed works by Orlande de Lassus (1532–94) and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1526–94). His influence on others was equally widespread, and his innovations, both imaginative and technical, were far-reaching. The striking economy of means and tonal language of his ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Hanz Fits’-ner) 1869–1949 German composer An opponent of all forms of modernism, Pfitzner composed his own music in a late-Romantic but highly individual style. His opera Palestrina (1917) – his confession of faith and his masterpiece – is about the cumulative wisdom of tradition, but also its renewal. His German nationalism was more idealistic than political, but his ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

as director of the Strasbourg Opera, Pfitzner wrote his masterpiece Palestrina. A large-scale work that, like Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, questions the artist’s position within society, Palestrina clings to the past and its cultural traditions. It was hailed by German intellectuals throughout the next few decades, until 1945 when the country lay in ruins along with ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Renaissance

wrote in the parody Mass form and chansons. Recommended Recording: Missa Maria zart, Tallis Scholars (dir) Peter Phillips (Gimell) Introduction | Renaissance | Classical Personalities | Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina | Renaissance | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

at Graz, and became a talented organist and church musician. He probably travelled to Italy during the 1680s, and his a capella Masses influenced by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–94) attracted the admiring attention of Emperor Leopold I in 1698. Based in Vienna for the remainder of his life, Fux was a respected composer of church music ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Renaissance

he remained there as organist after her death in 1603. The Counter-Reformation intensity of Victoria’s music encourages comparison with the paintings of his contemporary El Greco. Not as prolific as Palestrina or Lassus, Victoria published 20 Masses and a variety of smaller liturgical works. His Christmas motet O magnum mysterium (1572), on which he based a parody Mass, opens ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Renaissance

1543–1623 English composer Byrd’s early life is shrouded in mystery. He may have been born in Lincoln, but his formative years must have been spent at least partly in London; at some point in his youth he studied with Tallis. In 1563 he was made organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral. He married in 1569 and in ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Renaissance

Luther on Josquin des Prez Leading Exponents Johannes Ockeghem Jacob Obrecht Josquin des Prez Heinrich Isaac Adrian Willaert Carlo Gesualdo Orlande de Lassus Thomas Tallis William Byrd Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Giovanni Gabrieli Renaissance Style In the Renaissance style, motet writing supports four unaccompanied voices, which at times imitate one another in pairs. Introduction | Classical Music Styles & ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Early Baroque

as Cavalieri, were developing new approaches in sacred vocal music, with more soloistic vocal writing and instrumental accompaniment. But the older style, epitomized by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/6–94), persisted among some composers in Rome. This self-consciously archaic style was known as the stile antico and is found particularly in the works of his pupils, such as ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Renaissance

the sixteenth century. Some of the most prolific composers of Mass settings in the sixteenth century were the Spaniards Morales and Victoria, and, above all, the Italian Palestrina, whose 104 Masses combine technical mastery with expressive power and are considered the epitome of the Renaissance Mass style. England’s strong tradition developed rather separately from that on the ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

in, creating ever more contrived and sometimes witty devices. The list includes most of the Renaissance’s most famous names, and some, like Josquin and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/6–94), found the subject so fascinating that they wrote not one, but two, Masses based on it. Inside the Music | Musical Homage | Renaissance | Classical ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Early Baroque

types of writing are called polyphony (‘many sounds’) and homophony (‘same sound’); chordal considerations are not absent from polyphony, nor melodic ones from homophony. The sacred vocal works of Palestrina, in which each voice plays an equal role in the musical structure, are often described as one peak of the contrapuntal art, while, at the end ...